cerning the intermixture of races, and that relating to consanguinity. of marriages, have been mooted before you by Messrs. Boudin and Perier. The union of two relations and that of two individuals belonging to different races are like the two extremes of the same series. Is consanguinity a cause of disease and degeneration? Is intermixture a means of improving the races ? M. Perier answers these questions in the negative. Consanguinity is only injurious by hereditary disease; but when the two related parents belong to a family exempt from hereditary vice the fact of their relationship cannot injuriously affect their progeny. M. Bourgeois, M. Dally, M. Sanson sustained the same opinion; and the latter has related to you a number of facts borrowed from zootechnics, challenged by M. Boudin. Referring to statistics, the basis of which had been discussed by M. Dally, M. Boudin produced the figures which at any rate seemed to establish the influence of consanguine marriages in the production of deaf-mutism, and our colleague of Nogent-leRotrou, M. Brochard, has transmitted to you reports testifying to the same fact.

The second question in regard to ethnic crossings has been investigated by M. Perier, in a long treatise which has appeared in our Mémoires. Without asserting, as some modern authors have done, that all crossings of races are followed by a physical and intellectual degeneracy, and whilst admitting that races of the same type, of the same stock, may intermix without injury, our colleague thinks that crossings between remote races can only have injurious results, and is of opinion, cæteris paribus, that pure races are superior to the mixed races. M. Boudin joins M. Perier to proclaim the physical, intellectual, and moral inferiority of certain mongrels. M. de Quatrefages, however, without doubting these facts, maintains that in many cases intermixture tempers the races, improves their instincts, developes their aptitudes, and sometimes engenders capacities not possessed by the primary races.

Thus arose a discussion, which after occupying several of our sittings, gradually approached the most arduous questions of anthropology. The questions of the permanence of types, of the heredity of natural characters, of accidental characters, of atavism, which causes, after several generations, the types altered by crossing to re-appear; all these have in their turn been explored and solved according to the various standpoints of the speakers.

All agree that certain types have maintained themselves unchanged since the Pharaonic epoch; that some of them have even survived

multiplied crossings, and a total subversion of political and social conditions; but the dissidences only manifested themselves when the question arose whether the permanence of types was a general law, and whether certain races might not, under the influence of a change of external conditions, undergo more or less trenchant modifications. The question was asked whether the European race implanted for some centuries on the continent of America have in the new climate preserved their primitive character. The observations of M. Rameau on the AngloAmericans have revealed some curious particulars; but his remarks in regard to domestic animals and plants, and also to man, are merely relative to vital activity and functional power, but not to typical characters. The particulars furnished by M. Quatrefages would acquire more weight if they are confirmed; for they tend to establish that in some spots of North America the European and African races have something in their physiognomy which approaches them to the red-skins. But M. Martin de Moussy has opposed to these yet doubtful instances that of the Europeans of Paraguay, whom he has carefully observed, and who since the sixteenth century have maintained their type, without any alteration. He refers particularly to the history of a German colony, founded in 1535, by the soldiers of Charles the Fifth, who since that time have received no addition of a German element. These Germans of Paraguay are to this day perfectly like the Germans of Europe.

It is not only to the influence of climate that the power of modify ing the human types is attributed. It was asked whether certain artificial forms of the head might not during a series of generations become hereditary and produce permanent characters surviving the practice of deformation. This interpretation, admitted by M. Gosse, senior, as regards certain races of Peru, is doubted by M. Gratiolet, who has quite differently explained the facts invoked, and also by M. Perier, who has read before you his memoir on the Heredity of Anomalies.

A report by M. Trélat, on the extinction of the native races of Oceania and Guyana, induced you to trace the causes of such a deplorable result, which manifests itself wherever Europeans come in contact with uncivilized peoples, even when no violence is done to them. The diseases imported by the whites, the vices which they introduced by example, are only partial causes; it is not by increase of mortality, but by the diminution of births, by the diminishing fecundity of the females, that half savage populations perish when suddenly brought into contact with a civilized race. There was but one step

from this grave question to that of the perfectibility of the inferior races. Messrs. Quatrefages, Rufz, Delasiauve, and Pruner-bey, think that every race is perfectible, even that the Australians are not refractory to civilization; whilst Messrs. Perier, O'Rorke, and George Pouchet, despair of the future of these peoples.

I should here leave a serious gap if I were to omit mentioning the application of the facts furnished by zootechnics, namely, the examples of the races of domestic animals to the study of general anthropology. Messrs. de Quatrefages, Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Perier, Auburton, Trelat, Lagneau, and especially M. Sanson, have in the discussions relative to the intermixture of races, consanguinity, heredity, perfectibility, the permanence of types, brought to bear the facts borrowed from zootechnics, and M. Davelouis has, in a special mémoire, expounded the ideas of his teacher M. Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, on the relations of the latter science to anthropology.

In all these discussions on general anthropology you have listened to two series of arguments, inherent to two doctrines, which everywhere cause dissension, but are here, thanks to your exclusively scientific spirit, calmly discussed. For you, the monogenistic and polygenistic doctrines are no weapons of war; you do not bring to bear upon them political or religious prejudices; they do not divide you into two hostile sects, and the moderation, urbanity, and good faith which reign in your debates, prove that your opinions on this or any other point are only based on science. Without seeking for the occasion to express your opinions you have never dissimulated them. Last year, a report of M. Simonot induced you to investigate the causes of the colour of the skin of the Negro. This was the prelude of a discussion, which took place after a lecture of M. Pruner-bey, and which embraced all the questions relative to the influence of external conditions on the physical characters of the races of mankind. Messrs. Quatrefages and Pruner-bey on one side, and Messrs. d'Omalius d'Halloy, Trelat, Bertillon, Dally, and Sanson on the other, have treated these questions from opposite stand-points. No conclusion was arrived at, nor was it intended. Whilst each of us expresses his opinion freely, the society will never be called upon to express one; it is neither monogenist nor polygenist; it is a scientific association where everyone who likes to search for the truth may take his place without being asked to render an account of his opinions.

Moreover, gentlemen, this debate on the origin of races which some twenty years ago was called "The Great Controversy," is now produced under conditions, which renders it tributary to a greater ques

tion which may not admit of a decisive solution for a long time to come. When it was believed that humanity was quite recent and scarcely six thousand years old; when in the valley of the Nile upon monuments forty centuries old, there were found represented ethnic types as distinct then as they are now, Jews, Greeks, Egyptians, Hindoos, and Negroes, entirely like their present representatives, it might have been expected that the day would arrive when the question of the multiplicity of primitive types would be solved. But at this moment, the date of the first appearance of man seems indefinitely remote; the periods are no longer counted by hundreds or thousands, but by myriads of years, and we know that our five thousand years of history are but a short episode in the life of humanity. The types which we are enabled to study, appear to us permanent. Can we say that they are so? The four thousand years which have elapsed since the ethnic types have been depicted on the Egyptian monuments, may have produced in the corresponding races changes too slight to strike our attention, equivalent, for instance, to the tenth part of such which constitute for us race characters. But multiply this lapse of time by ten, and there will appear before us, I do not say demonstrated or demonstrable, but simply as possible, a conciliation of the monogenistic theory with most of the facts upon which the opposite theory rests.

This question of the antiquity of man which heads all the rest, could not escape your attention. It was not here that the question was engendered, but you were the first who examined, fathomed, and completed it; and I venture to say, that your discussions, reproduced in a great number of scientific and even political journals, have powerfully contributed to the triumph of truth. It is not lightly, gentlemen, that you have accepted the discoveries and the demonstration of Boucher de Perthes. When M. Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, in the sitting which preceded the first communication of M. George Pouchet, placed before you some hatchets and knives from the diluvium of Abbeville, objections were raised as to the validity of these proofs. Some of you doubted the origin of the flints, the abrupt surfaces and contours of which might have been produced by accidental causes. But when M. Boucher de Perthes sent other hatchets, when M. Gosse found exactly similar ones in the diluvium of Paris, together with knives and arrow-heads, the constant repetition of the same forms brought conviction to your minds.

The discussion which followed on primitive industry and its successive periods, on the transition from the roughly-worked to the polished flints, on the transition periods from the stone to the copper or bronze

age, and from this to the iron period; this discussion, in which Messrs. Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, de Castlenau, Gosse junior, Lagneau, Baillarger, and Verneuil, took part, and which implements M. Trelat compared with the actual industry of savage peoples; this discussion, I venture to say, may be cited as one of the most important and interesting contained in your Bulletins.

M. Gosse has exhibited before you, in the same gravel-pit, still moist, a fossil rib of the aurochs, and a flint arrow head; he has further shown you a carbonized bone which he has extracted from the diluvium in the gravel-pits of Grenelle. M. Geoffroy Saint-Hiliare has communicated to you the curious discovery of M. Lartet, who found upon the fossil bones of the rhinoceros tichorinus and the cervus megaceros, deposited in the gallery of the museum, the impress of the stonehatchets with which man used to cut up the animals before consuming them. I must condense, gentlemen, for the facts are here already too numerous to bear citing, but I must, nevertheless, remind you of M. Delanoue's interesting communication on the researches made in the valley of the Somme, and of the geological proofs regarding the antiquity of the diluvium, which, in addition to the hatchets, contains the remains of the rhinoceros and the elephant.

An intelligent being, capable of working the flints, of kindling fire, of killing and cutting up large animals, has then existed upon our soil simultaneously with the mammoth, the rhinoceros, the gigantic deer, and the cavern-bear,-animals the species of which have been extinct for an incalculable period of centuries.

The antiquity of man is thus reduced to the commencement of the quaternary period. It might ascend to the tertiary period, if it were true, as M. de Jouvencel supposed, that the sand pipes (puits naturels) were the work of man. But M. Bert has opposed this hypothesis by objections on the value of which I can pronounce no opinion. Moreover, the moment has not yet arrived to fix the time of man's advent upon the earth. Positive facts, irrefutable evidence, show that man existed at the time of the diluvium; this is the first date of his history, or rather the first known date, but it is not impossible that we may find traces of his earlier existence.

In order to form some idea of the immense period of time which must have elapsed since the diluvial hatchets were worked, I must recall to your minds the details given by M. Delanoue on the geological constitution of the bed of the Somme. There are, in the environs of Amiens, beneath the recent and the loess formation, the thickness of which amounts frequently to ten meters, two strata

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